‘The mindfulness of swimming is what I crave most during lockdown’

Harriet Hall used to view swimming lengths as a form of tiresome self-flagellation until she discovered it helped her anxiety

Illustration by Jacek Zmarz

Ever since the UK government imposed a coronavirus lockdown, many of us have been surprised to discover that it’s the little things – not the extravagant or the particularly earth-shattering – that we’ve missed the most. The Independent lifestyle desk’s new essay series, Life After Lockdown, is an ode to everything we took for granted in the pre-Covid world – and the things we can’t wait to do once again when normality eventually resumes.

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Of all the things we haven’t been able to do for so long – hug our relatives; gather with friends in pub gardens drinking cider to the sound of ice cubes clinking against pint glasses while sunburn develops on the backs of our necks; or bump shoulders with strangers at gigs – it might seem peculiar that the thing I’ve craved most during quarantine is a solitary pursuit.

Over the past three months, I have had dreams about swimming so lucid I swear I can feel myself floating and coursing through the water, waking up to catch my held breath.

I guess you could say swimming is in my genes. My grandfather used to wake at 6am every day, drive to his local pool and swim 50 lengths. He did this until he died, three months shy of his 94th birthday. He swam to clear his head, he told me – and days when he couldn’t go for whatever reason, he would express his frustration. By the time of his death, he had become such an integral part of the fabric of Tooting Leisure Centre that several fellow swimmers attended his memorial.

When I was growing up, my mother used to lifeguard at our local pool and took me and my brother swimming every weekend. The smell of chlorine is the smell of hugging my grandfather, of happy Saturdays splashing around the Latchmere Leisure Centre in south London, of big breaths held under water for defiant stretches of time.

The Maccabees were so enchanted by The Latchmere they wrote a song about it and the verruca socks that littered the changing-room floor. Made up of three swimming pools in one enormous hangar, each one flanked by elephant slides and faux rockery, this was my childhood Mecca. The anticipation would build as my mother strapped me into the car. I can still summon the shot of excitement I’d feel as the siren went off, signalling minutes before the wave machine would begin thrashing the water about and I’d swim right at it, spluttering and gasping. Afterwards, we would sit in the cafe, dry clothes sticking to damp skin and shivering as dripping hair left a wet patch down my back and I chomped on a well-earned packet of crisps. To me, swimming will always taste like salt and vinegar McCoys.

I watch the waves fill the spaces around me as I move them to make space for my body

Before you conjure images of me all athletic arms and rock-hard thighs with nose peg and Olympic aspirations, I must confess I am not and have never been "a swimmer". My entire life I have despised sporting activities and expended significant energy perfecting excuses to evade anything involving physical exertion. For most of my life, swimming was a chance to dip and dive and thrash; then later to float, beer in hand, sun overhead. Until last year, I couldn’t see pools as anything other than vessels for pratting around in. Lengths, as far as I was concerned, were a form of tiresome self-flagellation.

Then, one Sunday evening in September of last year, after year-long health problems exacerbated by anxiety and a persistent craving to peel off my skin just to escape the thump of my palpitating heart, I slipped on an impractical bikini, stepped into a pair of tracksuit bottoms, zipped myself into a hoodie and walked the seven minutes down the road to my local swimming pool. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, but my body seemed to know – walking through puddles of swimming costume drippings and inhaling the musky aroma unique to leisure centre changing rooms – the mechanical process took over like I had done this every day for years.

As I lowered myself into the not-quite-tepid deep end, flopping into the water like an ungainly seal and kicking off the back wall, the muscle memory of my early years returned. Bringing my hands together in horizontal prayer, pushing them through the water, rotating my palms outward and pulling back my arms in mechanical movement as I frogged my legs behind me, I watched the waves fill the spaces around me as I moved them to make space for my body.

After that, I went back twice a week. I bought myself an all-black swimming costume, cap and goggles and relished the anonymity in a neighbourhood I’d chosen to live in because I couldn’t turn a corner without bumping into a friendly face.

Chlorinated water is thicker than the usual, and it glides between my fingertips like molasses. Confined to this enormous fish tank, the monotonous movement of breaststroke, the lack of distraction; I can think. The swimming pool is loud with the tumult of screeching children, the high-pitched echoes creating a din that drowns out the noise. Under the surface, the pressure pushes up against my eardrums and all sensory distractions are removed. The day melts off my gliding body, my anxiety easing with every stroke.

I don’t count the lengths – it doesn’t matter how long I’m there or what I achieve or how precise my technique is. I don’t judge my body as I can’t help but do when I attend a yoga class full of svelte figures wondering why mine doesn’t fold and contort as perfectly as theirs or how my arse looks in downward dog; this is a place free from my own judgement and of tallying up progress. I simply swim up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down.

Some days I charge through the water and other times – much to the chagrin of my lane mates no doubt – I slow to observe the light dancing off the ripples, the knocking of mildewed lane dividers as they bob in the water, the little pieces of broken tiles below. This is my route to mindfulness. This is my meditation.

Under the surface, the pressure pushes up against my eardrums and all sensory distractions are removed. 

In lockdown I have kicked my feet in the ersatz swimming pool of the bath, but of course it isn’t the same. When I swim my grandfather is there swimming alongside me. I take a bite of the madeline and am transported back to a place where my head feels clear.

After lockdown, when leisure centres open once again, I will slip on my swimming costume, walk those seven minutes down the road past the dodgy off licence and the petrol station and swipe through the turnstile. Swimming up and down the 25 metres of a tiled box will, I know, feel like the most liberating moment of all.